(Start with “Tuesday” if you can. Hey, be happy it’s a short week. I usually coerce people into starting with “Monday”)
So, what were we talking about? Oh right. How handy it was that my fertility clinic had a Paypal account as well as an ATM right in the office.

In fact, the office I went to had the ATM conveniently located at the end of the examining table. The lesson to be learned here is: Don’t pick a complicated PIN code. Someday, you might have to enter it with your feet.

The clinic I went to accepted all forms of payment: Cash, credit card, personal cheques, traveler’s cheques, third party cheques, cheques from Slovaks;

War bonds, bar mitvah savings bonds, photos of Barry Bonds;

Blue chip stock, potato chip stock, livestock;

Money from co-signers, co-inhabitants, co-workers, and co-dependents.

Payments via donations, the United Nations, third world nations, descendants of Carrie Nation, Cary Grant, Carrie Fisher and Stephen King.

They accepted all forms of payment with one glaring exception: an IVF IOU.

At various times during my fertility treatments and financial demise, I offered all of the above.

Once I paid by personal cheque. The nurse told me they’d have my blood results in 3-5 business days.

I even schlepped some objets d’art to the clinic. I remember slapping a lovely paint-by-number landscape onto the bookkeeper’s desk. Unfortunately, the scene in the painting was no match for the one in the office.

I told her that the Antiques Roadshow said it was worth 8,652 dollars. She threw me out of her office and put a “No Peddling” sign on her door. What the hell was that? I wasn’t peddling. I was pleading.

My next cycle, a month later, I blew past her sign (I was a vagrant not a peddler) and barged into her office with the same masterpiece, figuring she sees a lot of desperate people and wouldn’t remember me.

This time I was prepared to sweeten the deal with a toaster that I’d gotten free for opening a bank account circa 1978, when they still gave you something besides a dirty look for choosing their fine institution to secure your 25 dollars.

I told her that the Antiques Roadshow had appraised the painting at 2500 dollars and the toaster, apparently used in Biblical times by my people to toast their bagels in the desert, priceless.

The bookkeeper, either having the worst day of her professional life, or just remembering me after all, told me to go do something that, considering where she worked, I’m sure she knew was not a road to conception.

On the way out, I ever so politely closed the door, took a marker, and changed the sign from “No Peddling” to “No Paddling” for all of the people drowning in infertility debt whom she’d sent up the creek, oarless.

Listen I gotta go. They caught the person who stole my identity and I feel I owe her an apology. I’ll talk with you tomorrow.